About Me

Friday, March 20, 2020

4th Sunday of Lent Yr A (John 9:1-41)) Seeing with new eyes

How
quickly everything can change. A few months ago it was unthinkable
that all of our churches would be closed for several weeks,
especially over Easter and yet here we are. It is not the first time
this has happened either. There have been other epidemics in the past
which have caused churches to be closed. From 1918-1920 the world was
hit with the Spanish Flu pandemic, a particularly deadly strain of
the flu which took the lives of between 17-50 million people. 500
million people were infected worldwide. That is almost hard to
comprehend by today’s standards, but that is what happened.
Churches were closed then too.

This
morning, Friday 20th, we celebrated our last public mass
until further notice. It was inspiring to see such a large crowd at
the mass and it was a very emotional time for all of us. The idea of
not being able to receive the Eucharist for Catholics, is a kick in
the stomach. For a priest not to be able to celebrate the mass with
his people is very painful. Yet good will come out of this too. It
has already made many people aware of how privileged we are to be
able to have mass every day, something that in many parts of the
world is not possible. I was talking to a priest friend of mine who
worked in South America for some time. He told me that in one place
where he worked, he had just two other priests with him (one
semi-retired) and between them they had to cover 53 churches. That
meant that most of those people would only have been able to attend
mass every several weeks. In most places in the United States there
is weekly mass and in many places there is daily mass. In my home
country of Ireland, most parishes have daily mass. We are blessed,
but we don’t realize it.

This
crisis is also reminding us just how important it is to be able to
worship together. This is what the early Christians did. They met in
each other’s houses and celebrated the Eucharist together. ‘Every
day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke
bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts’
(Acts 2:46). They
gradually grew in numbers and eventually they were able to build
bigger places of worship called churches. If this painful time helps
us to appreciate how blessed we are to have the Eucharist so often
and to remember what the Eucharist is, then that in itself is worth a
lot.

In
ancient Israel, when the people were captured and brought into exile
in Babylon (near Bagdad, in modern day Iraq), they felt that God was
no longer with them, since they no longer had the temple. Sacrifices
to God could only be made in the temple. The prophets helped them to
see that God was still with them, even if it wasn’t as they would
like it to be. It is the same for us. Although our churches are
closed at this time and we cannot receive the Eucharist, God is still
with us. Masses are still being celebrated by the priests.

Times
of crisis are also times of growth. Apart from the scare of
contracting the virus, it is also a time of crisis when we cannot go
to the church and receive the Eucharist. But this crisis will help us
to grow deeper in our faith and perhaps see with new eyes how much
God has blessed us.

Now
let us turn to this account of Jesus healing a man blind from birth.
The fact that he was blind from birth emphasizes that giving him
sight would have been a complete miracle and totally unheard of. Once
he has been healed, he then comes to believe that Jesus is Lord. The
miracles that Jesus worked did more than just heal the person, they
were also pointing to who he was and is. When the man is questioned
by the religious authorities, he is not able to explain what
happened, or how, but simply that it did happen and that he now
believes. He does not have the official ‘education’ or religious
knowledge, to be able to know the things of God, and yet he comes to
believe. On the other hand, the religious leaders of the time had the
official education. They were the experts and yet they could not and
would not recognize who Jesus was. Perhaps it was partly their
religious knowledge which became an obstacle for them. Because Jesus
healed this man on the Sabbath, they concluded that he could not be
from God, because that was their understanding of how God worked.
They had a particular understanding of how God must be, and since
Jesus didn’t fit this picture, they concluded he could not be from
God. Essentially their minds were closed and they didn’t want to
know. But God often acts outside the way we think things should
happen. The religious leaders were confined to a narrow understanding
of God. You could say that they had a blindness of the heart. The
blind man, on the other hand, was physically blind, but he had an
openness of heart. Not only did he come to physically see, but more
importantly he came to believe.

We
have a particular understanding of what it means to believe and how
we should express that faith: namely by going to church, praying and
loving our neighbor. This is good and important, but that does not
mean that God cannot bring people to faith in a completely different
way as well. Muslims, Hindus, and many others believe in God too, but
they have a very different understanding than we do. That doesn’t
mean it’s wrong. It is just different.

This
is a time when we can ask God to help us see again, with new eyes,
all that He has given us and is teaching us. The Lord only requires
an open heart. Once we are open, God will teach us everything.